Monday, July 28. 2008

News from TechCrunch pointed to the long awaited launch of Cuil (nee Cuill), pronounced "kewl" ( or "cool" if you are from the US ) a new general search engine out the blocks - with 120 billion pages indexed apparently. This couldn't come at a better time given Google's emerging propensity to bias results to favour its own content. Thus, it was time for a road test. I chose 3 topics:

The first thing to notice is that Cuil's search page is black (as is that on our real time search engine design - clearly they have good taste . The next is that the results page is not top to bottom linear, but presents a page of results, with picture thumbnails if they exist:

Cuil Results Page - Buttermilk Pancakes

Two things hit me - firstly, that there were no Knol based entries on the Cuil front page. Secondly, my Google results, although deliberately searched on "The World" and not "The UK" setting, looked nothing like Dare Obasanjo's search, mine had far more BBC and other UK based pages served. There were only 2 common pages between my Google page and Cuil. I had to manually switch over to Google.com to replicate Dare's search - so clearly searching "the world" from the UK is still very UK focussed - why is that?

What was more interesting after that was that the difference between the Yahoo, Cuil and Google search pages were fairly negligible apart from the Knol entry on Google. (In fact, my most delightful discovery on this journey was the Yahoo drop down context menu when you enter a search term).

Freeconomics

Google did the "Right Thing" here and brought up our blog article on this on the front page I couldn't find our article on the first 3 pages of Cuil, and the only one I did find, on page 4, is a far less trafficked or referenced article. Yahoo found our article top of page 2. As to the other articles on the 3 engines, there is clearly not a Knol yet ( ) and the results were similar, but not the same - I must admit to some surprise seeing Cuil record The Evangelical Outpost twice on this topic:

Comparison of "Freeconomics" Search

(I was reading Cuil down each column at a time to define order......)

Rosicrucians

I was looking it up anyway, so tried all 3. Google and Yahoo's first 2 posts were sponsored, and then they got straight down to business - an article on Rosicrucianism on Wikipedia. Cuil couldn't quite bring itself to get the Wikipedia article on "Rosicricianism" but opted instead for the article on the Ancient Order of the Rosicrucians on No 3 - sans any sponsored pages.

Privacy

Cuil tries to set itself apart from Google here, its policy stated as:

.... our privacy policy is very simple: when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours.

My name

Searched for my name, didn't feature in Cuil till page 4 (where it brought up my Twitter account). Yours truly is on page 1 on Google and Yahoo via Broadstuff. I note my Indiana artist, Australian and Argentinian namesakes are still there on page 1, so Cuil clearly does not love blog based links very much.

(Update - a few other things....)

- If you mis-search for Coase's Laew (as opposed to Law) Google knows what you're after, Cuil gets totally confused, Yahoo thinks you are after Case law.
- "Apple" got not one record on page 1 of the actual fruit on Cuil.
- when I searched for the Tuatha de Danaan on Cuil, the graphic was a planet of the apes type monkey - thats not the fair Faerie people, its the Fir Bolg

Conclusions

Well, any search engine that can't reference our blog is clearly a non starter for the cognoscenti! Apart from that glaring omission, I think its search is "mostly harmless" - it doesn't bias for Knols, and it comes up with roughly the same stuff as the others (though not as much or as often as the 120 billion links may imply). The question for Cuil is - whats the differentiator here? I don't think pretty pictures helps that much, and the layout leaves me largely unmoved.

Privacy could become a competitive issue, but I think its still a minority sport - noting how little care the munchkins have with Facebook and Google privacy today, I (sadly) conclude its one of these things that exercises the digerati but few others.

In fact, the biggest aha for me from this is that Yahoo has come on apace since the last time I looked at it.

(For the record - I've used Dogpile for 10 years very happily)

An aside - David Kelly notes that Cuil say their name in theory means "knowledge" in Irish. Um - that bit o' me that is forever gaelic tells me that Cuil means corner or recess or rear. If it's Cuill (the original company name) then that's straight out of Irish legend (the coming of the Tuatha De Danaan) where Mac Cuill was named after a tree, the hazel (or Coll) which in Celtic Mythology gives you wisdom from eating the nut, which the Salmon of Knowledge did. So, a bit roundabout, but in some recess of the name Cuil is the concept of knowledge, though it'd drive you nuts to find it and it all seems a bit fishy

Update thought - catching up on all the comments on this blog and elsewhere (try typing Cuil on Summize), I am left scratching my head as to why Cuil launched now (when it would seem it was too early) and why not go "beta". After all, you only get 1 shot at the launch mojo. Still, to be fair, people were moaning about Google vs AltaVista et al as late as 2002 if I recall correctly.

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